You wouldn’t believe some of the things you can
find in a magazine called “Silicon India”

Ethan really likes to have lots of text on his web page. And his page is pretty much the best thing around. The problem is, in order to have lots of text, you need to be really witty. And right now I just don’t feel too witty. So I’m going to put lots of pictures on here, which makes things easier for me. It’s also good for people with extremely short attention spans, although I imagine that most of them have stopped reading this by now and have started clicking on the buttons on the left. That means that I can start making fun of them.

See, here is my theory about ADD. It all started with the show Bill Nye the Science Guy. Well, maybe it didn’t start with it, but Bill Nye was certainly partially responsible. I mean, take a look at this guy’s show: the camera doesn’t stay still for more than 5 seconds at a time! It leaps from here to there, it circles around, it jitters constantly as if the cameraman OD’d on Vivarin… say that Bill wants to state a simple scientific fact, like “an object’s temperature is the measure of the average kinetic energy of its constituent particles.” It will take him approximately one-third of the half-hour episode, because he can’t finish the sentence with at least three changes in camera angle, 5 sound effects, 3 cartoon animation overlays, and a guy in a giant rat costume coming into his lab and scalding him with a Bunsen burner while he tries to make huge arm gestures.

This is great for kids who grew up on the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers because it’s the only way that they’ll possibly stay on the channel for more than a few minutes, but what about the Voltron generation? I want a show about science without any of the stupid gimmicks designed by pharmaceutical companies to keep Ritalin on the shelves. Why not have a normal guy — not some guy with crazy hair in a lab coat, surrounded by Erlenmeyer flasks and distillation apparatus — but just a normal guy in a t-shirt, talking about interesting scientific principles in a normal voice? I know that this show would fail miserably, but I would watch it. I wish that more kids would.